


driftwood skeletons

by blueskiddoo



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 13:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18700867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueskiddoo/pseuds/blueskiddoo
Summary: He wants to look away, he wants to grab the oars himself and lose himself in the push and pull of sweat and sinew, sweat and salt. But he can’t. Even here, even now, they all play their parts.Governor Thomas Hamilton. He hadn’t believed it when he heard.*Thomas Hamilton is sent to tame Nassau as her governor. Flint sees him again for the first time on the beach, offering pardons and forgiveness and everything that it's too late to accept.





	driftwood skeletons

**Author's Note:**

> flint's meeting with woodes rogers on the beach except thomas is governor of nassau instead of rogers. this has almost certainly been done a thousand times before but I found it in my drafts so thought I'd toss it up!

The beach is quiet.

The beach shouldn’t be quiet, the beach should be teeming with his fucking men, dirty and stinking and filled with contrition for taking their money and stabbing them in the back with the same hand, but Flint finds that he doesn’t care.

Because the beach is quiet, but it’s not empty.

The longboat's journey from the Walrus to land is the longest it's ever been, Flint squinting in the sun as the oars slap rhythmically against the water. He wants to look away, he wants to grab the oars himself and lose himself in the push and pull of sweat and sinew, sweat and salt. But he can’t. Even here, even now, they all play their parts.

Governor Thomas Hamilton. He hadn’t believed it when he heard.

Perhaps he still doesn’t believe it now, even as the beach comes into sharper and sharper clarity. He’s seen things that weren’t real before. Some men see sirens on the waves that threaten to lure them to their doom. He sees Miranda, her placid expression at odds with the hole in her head.

He sees Thomas.

The longboat creaks as he hops out of it, his boots splashing in the shallows. The sharp retort of the water against his skin is a welcome familiarity. It’s real. Somehow, all of this is real.

He wishes it wasn’t.

A simple pavilion has been constructed on the beach, just a piece of canvas shading the three men underneath. The British soldiers look like bloodstains on the sand, their expressions schooled into perfect seriousness. If they have doubts, they don’t show them. If they’re afraid, they don’t flinch as Flint crosses the beach. He thinks he hears wood groan as their grips on their muskets tighten.

Or maybe it’s just the chair as Thomas stands to greet him, a display of ceremony that makes the vice on his heart tighten. He looks older than the last time Flint saw him, but he supposes they all do. It’s been a long time.

Governorship suits him. His hair has grown longer, tied back at the nape of his neck, which is wise. Wigs don’t fare well in the heat of Nassau, far from where civilized men reign. Still, there’s a healthy flush to his cheeks despite the sweat staining his collar, like a potted flower finally exposed to the sun.

But there are still the scars. The hollow look to his cheeks, like he lost a lot of weight all at once and has still yet to regain it. The circles under his eyes are darker now, harder to carry with age. Without someone to tell him to go to sleep. Miranda was always better at that, always sensible, always—

And there’s the eye, or course. Flint has no explanation for that, no theory, only a bubbling rage that threatens to burn him up from the inside out. Thomas’ right eye is milky white with blindness.

But he still sees him well enough. His gaze cuts through him like a knife as Thomas politely inclines his head. “Captain.”

“Governor.”

Thomas doesn’t offer him his hand and Flint can admit that he’s grateful. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he touched him now. He’s not sure if he’s ready to accept that the man in front of him isn’t a ghost after all.

“Please, take a seat.” Thomas does so himself, gesturing to his soldiers behind him. “If you’d please, gentleman.”

The soldiers hesitate, their eyes flickering toward Flint like he’s a cur that’s wandered in off the street and taken a seat at the dinner table. “Sir—“

“If I were afraid of one pirate, I dare say I would have been smart enough not to step on this island at all.” He manages to make it almost sound like a joke, a small, secret smile playing on his lips, but the order is firm beneath it. “Now, if you’d please,” he repeats.

His redcoats retreat up the beach to take up positions where the beachgrass starts to swallow the dunes, well out of earshot. Flint watches them, studying the brass buttons on their uniforms.

“James.” Thomas’ voice is so soft, his eyes so sad. Flint’s eyes flicker back toward him. He isn’t sure what to show on his face, so he shows nothing at all. “What are we doing here?”

Flint shifts in his chair, the wood creaking as he rests one elbow on the arm of it, fingers toying with his beard. He wonders what it must be like, seeing himself through Thomas’ eyes. He wonders if he looks as different as he feels. In the Navy he’d been very aware that he was allotted a finite amount of space in this world, space he had to prove he was worthy of every inch of. That was before he’d been brave enough to take. Before he understood that space that had to be begged and borrowed wasn’t truly his at all.

“Fighting a war, I suppose,” he says, going for off-handed, but it comes out far more gently than he intended. Damn him. Even after all this, Thomas cracks him open like an oyster without barely a word at all.

But there’s no pearl. Sometimes it feels like all there’s left inside is rot.

“We don’t have to be.” He smiles softly, ruefully. “Captain James Flint, the most feared pirate in the colonies. I didn’t know it was you, you know. Not until very recently. I had thought you were in Amsterdam, until I heard of the attack on Charlestown.” He falters. “Miranda...”

“Miranda,” he agrees. His knuckles rap softly against the wood as he drops his hand to rest on the arm of the chair. God, he can’t do this. He feels like a schoolboy in church, squirming in the pew like he can already feel hellfire licking at his heels. Only this time he’s been to hell and back, and he’s less than impressed. “He told us you were dead. Lord Peter Ashe.”

Three words, as heavy as round shot and twice as explosive. The only shame in Ashe’s death is that he can’t kill him again.

“I know,” Thomas says. “My father’s doing, I suspect.”

He knows, he knows, he knows. Has Thomas known it all then, while they fought and wept and killed in the dark? He tries to muster hate, but the inside of him feels scraped raw.

“When he died—“ When he was killed. Murdered. Executed. “—the pressure keeping in me in the hospital disappeared. It was difficult, of course. I suffered a fever in my time there that cost me the sight in my right eye. That place—sometimes I thought I really was mad. Or that I’d end up that way, without the two of you.” His smile flickers. “I was able to get myself released, salvaged pieces of my reputation. Whatever my father left, at least. I thought—I thought he couldn’t take everything. Everything we worked toward. No matter what it took, I couldn’t let him have that too.”

Flint’s eyes dart over the table between them, taking in the pattern of the wood grain without really seeing it. Thomas the thinker, Thomas the dreamer. He loved Nassau like another man would a child.

He loved the idea of Nassau, the idea of saving it. The idea of being something bigger then himself.

“You didn’t look for us,” Flint says. It’s not a question.

“No,” Thomas says. “Why should I?”

Flint’s eyes cut upward.

Thomas meets them, the abject misery hidden beneath only the thinnest veneer of polite society. “What I did to you, James,” he says, nearly a whisper. “What I did to the both of you is unforgivable.”

“What you did?” His voice comes out scathing, his brows pulled together. His heart slams against his chest so loud the fucking king must hear it. How could he think—how could he say—

“We were happy,” Thomas says. “Weren’t we? The three of us? We were happy and I destroyed it—not my father. I did. Miranda told us we were on the path to destruction, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to hear it. I thought, perhaps, if I just wanted it badly enough—surely the world would find a way to make it happen. Surely I could have it all.”

“I was just as much a part of that as you were,” he argues, trying not to hear Miranda’s voice behind his words. How many times had she begged them to let it go?

“If not for me, you would be a captain in the king’s navy by now,” he says. He doesn’t look him up and down, doesn’t say _not this_.

“Fuck the king,” Flint snarls.

In the distance his redcoats shift. Thomas holds up a hand, holding them at bay like well-trained dogs.

“I could have left London,” Thomas says evenly, but Flint doesn’t miss the cracks in his composure. The flutter of his eyelids, the way his hand lays on the table between them, too still to be natural. “Retired to the country. Taken up...painting landscapes in the garden. Plenty of people wanted me to disappear. But I couldn’t. I had to make all of this mean something.” He looks around, as if the sand beneath their feet were something living, something that could be saved. “I know things have been...unstable here, but—“

“You know,” Flint says slowly, “that I’m the most hated man in the New World.” A sick curl of satisfaction accompanies the thought, and he’s careful to let it show.

If he was expecting Thomas to flinch, he’s left disappointed. “But I’ve done it,” Thomas presses on. “The pardons, the infrastructure. What we fought for all those years ago. This is what we wanted. A Nassau free from fear. A Nassau that can prosper.”

But there's a price. There's always a price. In Nassau it's usually you're life. In England, it's your soul.

“You would have me apologize,” he murmurs.

“I would have you live,” Thomas nearly snaps, and he can see the years carved out of his soul. “I would save you, where I couldn’t save you before, but I cannot guarantee your safety if you continue down this road. If you could just set aside your pride—“

“You think this is about pride?” His hand smacks the table and he half-stands before he realized what he’s doing, is aware of anything but his own twisting heart. Something instead of his trembles. Was it always about pride? Had he only deluded himself into thinking it was about love?

Thomas leaps up in the same moment his men move, his voice cracking across the empty sand. “The first man to draw his weapon will be court marshaled for insubordination,” he says without even turning around. His men freeze, their muskets half-raised. “Now stand down.”

It’s too much. All he can see is Ashe’s lieutenant, the crack of a pistol and the stink of gunpowder in the air. Miranda falls, over and over, in his dreams, her head a bloody ruin. In that moment he’d known what it was like to be powerless. He’d known what it was like to have nothing.

It’s not the kind of thing you can come back from, he thinks.

“A pardon is a piece of paper,” Flint says in a low voice, something terrible burning in his chest. Fear and anger and self-loathing have run hand in hand for so long he can’t tell them apart. “Written by a king who will never even read it. What do you think happens, if I agree to sign one? Where do you think we go from here?” He leans forward, his hands planted on the table. The redcoats twitch in the distance, hound dogs furious to be muzzled, but they do nothing. This Thomas is different than the one who stood in front of a salon and preached leniency. Just as idealistic but in a different way. Sharper. Harder.

He worked a miracle being here today, fulfilling the dream he always fought for, but even he cannot change this. “You think we could be safe. We could be happy.” He shakes his head and resists the urge to run his hand over his shaved scalp. Does any part of him resemble the officer that met Thomas Hamilton that day? “The colonies won’t tolerate Captain James Flint.” Not after what he’s done, not when he’d gladly do it again. “And the British won’t tolerate James McGraw.” His voice goes soft. “Not here. Not with you.”

And that’s what England does. It takes and it twists and it leaves something unrecognizable in its wake. A broken piece that no longer fits into the machine it was built for.

Finally, Flint looks away. He can’t take Thomas’ gaze. Not when he’s looking at him like that. He straights up.

“This became bigger than you and I a long time ago,” he says. He looks back toward the Walrus. His surrender would gut their movement, and who would take his place? Silver is bold, but inexperienced, like a bullet shot into the sky. He thinks he’s at the top now, but there’s no telling who he’ll hit on his way down.

“You’re right,” Thomas says with a smile, tight-lipped and rueful. His eyes on the table. “Of course you’re right.”

If he kissed him, would he taste like a dead man? Or the sea? He supposed they’re all their own kind of ghost now, the three of them. Flint takes a reluctant step back, signally the end of the conversation without being quite brave enough to say so.

“Governor,” he says.

“Captain.”

He doesn't look back.


End file.
